It's not pedantic or petulant. The infographic is misleading, though not dramatically so. It looks suspicious to compare the US until the year 2000 and China

It's not pedantic or petulant. The infographic is misleading, though not dramatically so. It looks suspicious to compare the US until the year 2000 and China only starting in 2011. There's a gap of a decade. If you assume that US use is likely increasing (a decent assumption), then the statistic could be misleading. It turns out that the US has used about a gigaton in just the last decade. That's a bit more than twice as fast as its average during the 20th century. During the past 3 years, China used cement about 29 times faster than the US. If you aren't careful, you might think the infographic suggests that number is 48x. http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-cement-in-the-us/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-cem... China has a lot of people and a lot of catching up to do. Even the misleading number isn't that surprising to me. It turns out concrete lasts a while, and US usage has been spread over a century. In the long run, the integral matters more than today's derivative.